January 29, 2016

Set in a fictitious African nation, this novel by the distinguished writer Sony Labou Tansi takes aim at the corruption, degeneracy, violence, and repression of political life in Africa. At the heart of The Shameful State is the story of Colonel Martillimi Lopez, the nation’s president, whose eccentricity and whims epitomize the “shameful situation in which humanity has elected to live.” Lopez stages a series of grotesque and barbaric events while his nation falls apart. Unable to resist the dictator’s will, his desperate citizens are left with nothing but humiliation. The evocation of this deranged world is a showcase for the linguistic and stylistic inventiveness that are the hallmark of Sony Labou Tansi’s work.

This first English translation by Dominic Thomas includes a foreword by Congolese writer Alain Mabanckou that contextualizes the novel’s importance in literary history and the significance of Sony Labou Tansi for future generations of writers.

Fill out the form below for your chance to win a copy of The Shameful State! Take a sneak peek at the book in this excerpt.

January 28, 2016

Convinced that nothing has happened to him, Colin Rafferty travels to the sites of historic events to see the monuments and memorials erected there. In his new book Hallow This Ground, Rafferty ponders how these monuments work and what they say about us, and also who he might become.

Rafferty shares more about his book and the transformation he went through while visiting sites from Columbine High School to Auschwitz in this interview:

Why were you drawn to exploring monuments and memorials?

“Because it is there,” is the answer George Mallory is supposed to have given to a woman who asked him why he wanted to climb Everest back in the 1920s. I suppose my impulses are the same—all those monuments and memorials are there already, constantly driven past and mowed around, and no one seemed to want to write about them.

Maybe it’s more about the idea of the Midwest, or the idea of the suburbs, or the idea of the Midwestern suburbs like the one in which I grew up in Kansas City—the common lament of youth is that there’s nothing there, that nothing ever happens. Of course there are always things happening all the time everywhere; it’s very difficult to find a stretch of ground on this planet where you can state with authority that no one has ever set foot there. This book grew out of this feeling that even if it seemed like nothing had happened in my life and nothing had happened where I’d live, something must have happened.

So I started looking around for the signs that something had happened, and it turned out that those signs are everywhere—it’s just that they’d been part of the landscape for so long that they’d become invisible. Once I realized that, I saw them all the time, and the book grew from that. There’s not a first monument for this project, but maybe a first dozen monuments, all of which stuck together into something I thought I had to address.

The essay “Hallow This Ground” takes its title from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. In the address, Lincoln says that it is the dead and not the living who make a place sacred; however, it is the living who build memorials and monuments in order to commemorate what happened there. Why do you think the living feel the need to do this?

Well, the thing about history is that they keep making more of it, so I think the reason for memorialization is a reaction to that occasionally overwhelming speed of history—once we’ve got something in stone or steel on the spot, then we know it’s not going anywhere. But I think, too, that there’s some modeling that happens with memorializing history and people; we make monuments to the generations before us to show the generations after us how we want to be remembered, or maybe just that we want to be remembered.

Do you think memorials exist to provoke us to remember or to allow us to forget?

I think they allow us to make remembering optional. By officially commemorating an event, we’ve performed an act that we consider adequate for respecting (however one wants to define that word) the dead. Your county courthouse probably has a statue of a soldier on its front lawn, but unless you’ve made the effort to visit it—unless you’ve made the effort to use the memorial’s role as repository of memory—you probably don’t know what war it commemorates.

There’s an artist in Europe, Gunter Denmig, who has installed tens of thousands of tiny memorials, small cubes with a brass overlay, in front of homes from which victims of the Holocaust were deported. He calls them Stolperstein, which literally means “stumbling block.” It’s the largest memorial in the world, and a remarkable one, because each individual block acts as a catalyst for reminding the viewer of what happened, rather than allowing them to forget. Because they’re spread out into the cities, rather than contained in a public space, the stolperstein subvert that normal containment of memory. They’re quite audacious in that way.

In your essay “The Path,” you look for the memorial that commemorates a walkway collapse in your hometown, but can’t find anything. Why do we choose to memorialize some incidents and not others?

With the hotel walkway collapse in Kansas City that forms the impetus for “The Path,” there are corporate interests in play, and for a long time, it was tough to convince people to stay at a hotel that openly reminded them that 114 people died. But our desire for memorialization usually wins out, and while this book was going to press, a small memorial park near the hotel was dedicated.

So maybe what I’m trying to figure out in part in this book is not so much the question of why we memorialize some incidents and not others, but rather why some get memorialized before others. The wheel of time seems to turn to everyone eventually.

What did you learn about yourself while visiting the monuments and memorials you write about in your book? Did the experience of visiting these places change you?

It would have been impossible, I think, to spend so much time at these sites marked by moments of change (both big and small) and not be changed as well. But I also wanted to resist the easy emotional punch of memorials, where tourists go to the site, feel exactly what they’re supposed to feel, and then go on to the next thing on their list, so I made a conscious effort to be very deliberate in my visits, and to try to see how the memorials and monuments worked, and then to consider what else was at work (or prevented from working) at the site. It made me a more deliberate person, I think—someone willing to sit and wait for the place to reveal itself.

What was the most personally meaningful monument you visited and why?

If this project has an origin, it might be the day in high school in which I read a New Yorker article about the efforts of curators to preserve the Auschwitz site. I’d always known that history happens in places, but that was one of the first times I’d realized that those places were contested and in transition.

So I spent the next dozen or so years thinking about Auschwitz, and for a site that I had no claim to, it held in a way that is tough to explain. When I finally reached the site, after years of thinking about it and preparing to go there, it was tremendously overwhelming—here it is, the place you’ve thought about for the majority of your life is real. And then to be in that place for a week, living there, eating there, shopping there—that time made the whole thing incredibly complex and intense.

There were certainly memorials that had a more direct personal connection to me—the ones in Kansas City, for example, or the ones in Washington that my wife and I explored together—but Auschwitz has been the one that drilled down into the me the deepest.

What is your next writing project?

Because I now live in Virginia, I’ve been surrounded by presidential sites for the last few years—obvious places like Mount Vernon and Monticello but also less notable sites like the John Tyler grave in Richmond and James Monroe’s law office. As a result, I’ve been working on a series of forty-four essays, one for each president. Each one also tries to experiment with what the essay form can do, too, so it includes things like essays written as palindromes and death songs, prayers and movie scripts—there’s even a short comic. It’s also a tremendous motivator; if I can get an essay about Millard Fillmore published, then what’s stopping me from doing just about anything?

Take a sneak peek at Hallow This Ground in this excerpt. If you like what you read here, please consider suggesting it for your book club! Book club discussion questions are available in the book and on our website.

January 27, 2016

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. To commemorate this occasion, we offer the following reading selections from our books and journals to help further your understanding of antisemitism and the Holocaust:

Witnessing the Robbing of the JewsA Photographic Album, Paris, 1940-1944Sarah GensburgerTranslated by Jonathan Hensher with the collaboration of Elisabeth Fourmont

From 1942 onwards, ordinary Parisian Jews—mostly poor families and recent immigrants from Eastern Europe—were robbed, not of sculptures or paintings, but of toys, saucepans, furniture, and sheets. Witnessing the Robbing of the Jews tells how this vast enterprise of plunder was implemented in the streets of Paris by analyzing images from an album of photographs found in the Federal Archives of Koblenz.

Noah Shenker calls attention to the ways that audiovisual testimonies of the Holocaust have been mediated by the institutional histories and practices of their respective archives. He analyzes the ways in which interview questions, the framing of the camera, and curatorial and programming preferences impact how Holocaust testimony is molded, distributed, and received.

"This volume, rich in information . . . is recommended as a valuable compilation of research and analysis that will help concerned readers track the evolution of anti-Semitism and determine which trends are most worrisome." —Publishers Weekly

European Muslim AntisemitismWhy Young Urban Males Say They Don't Like JewsGünther Jikeli

Antisemitism from Muslims has become a serious issue in Western Europe, although not often acknowledged as such. This study addresses those issues and is rich in qualitative data that will mark a significant step along the path toward a better understanding of contemporary antisemitism in Europe.

Alfred Kinsey and the Remaking of Jewish Sexuality in the Wake of the HolocaustRachel GordanJewish Social StudiesVol. 20, No. 3 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 72-99

Until the work of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, which explored the science of the individual's sexual response, Alfred Kinsey's work on sexual behavior in males and females, which described population behavior, was not only the landmark reference on sexology but also the source of tremendous and varied reaction among moral leaders in America. In spite of the common moral ground implied by the newly popular “Judeo-Christian tradition,” Jewish and Christian responses to Kinsey revealed fundamental differences in attitude. Christians felt generally threatened, whereas some Jews found much that affirmed their traditions. Substituting Nazi ideology's stereotypes of the carnal Jew (a stereotype with an ancient tradition) with an image of the sexually inhibited Jewish male, Kinsey's portrayal of the Jewish approach to sex was almost as damning as what it replaced. Yet rather than attack Kinsey, a few Modern Orthodox voices used the occasion of his popularity as an opportunity to champion a Jewish approach to sex that spoke as much to Cold War heteronormativity as it did to post-Holocaust desires for a vital Orthodox Judaism.

The Past That Does Not Pass: Israelis and Holocaust MemoryDalia OferIsrael StudiesVol. 14, No. 1, Israelis and the Holocaust: Scars Cry out for Healing (Spring, 2009), pp. 1-35

Dalia Ofer raises issues that relate to the centrality of the Holocaust in the lives and imagination of many Israelis, and as a pivotal event that shapes their Jewish-Israeli identity. She examines the positions held by Israelis on the meaning of the Holocaust and the shaping of its memory, and asks whether the presence of the Holocaust in our lives represents an honest, unwavering effort to understand the Holocaust and its place in our world as human beings, Jews, and Israelis, or is a result of manipulating forces that use and abuse the memory of the Holocaust to advance unrelated political or social causes. The article presents a profusion of voices in Holocaust discourse and asks whether these are complementary or conflicting messages. It discusses the groups for whom the Holocaust was a personal experience, their offspring, who experienced the Holocaust as a family memory, and others whose memory of the Holocaust was shaped by survivors' testimonies, social processes, and the internalization of cultural messages. It focuses on the contribution of these groups in Holocaust research and artistic representation centering on literature, film, and music.

January 26, 2016

Alice Nakhimovsky and Roberta Newman’s Dear Mendl, Dear Reyzl: Yiddish Letter Manuals from Russia and America won in the Anthologies and Collections category. This book delves into the letters, essays and annotations of 20th-century Jewish families that could only keep in touch through written word. Correspondence was a challenge for some Jews that were not used to writing out their feelings and thoughts, thus Yiddish-language books of model letters became their templates and handbooks to communicate with their loved ones.

The winner of the Sephardic Culture category was author David A. Wacks's book Double Diaspora in Sephardic Literature: Jewish Cultural Production Before and After 1492. Wacks examines the works of Sephardic writers from the 13th to 16th centuries based on the study of two Sephardic diasporas—first from Biblical Zion and later from the hostland, Sefarad. Wacks brings Diaspora Studies into conversation with medieval and early modern Sephardic literature for the first time.

By Gary DunhamDirector of Indiana University Press and Digital Publishing

In the beginning, middle, and end, a job is always about people, especially in publishing. As I have said many times, the staff at Indiana University Press are a true delight to work with—smart, funny, and so dedicated to our authors, publications, and university. In the weeks to come, you’ll have a chance to learn more about them in our new Humans of IU Press feature on this blog.

Wait! You also might have a chance to work with them! Lots of positions and new opportunities are opening up at Indiana University Press, and I encourage you to take a look at what is available when the jobs are posted in the coming weeks. Honestly, there isn’t a better time to work with some amazing people as they redefine what a university press can and should do. Today is SUCH an exhilarating, game-changing moment in scholarly publishing. At the Press, inspired and fueled by our university, we’re blazing a trail of technological innovation, promotional creativity, organizational experimentation, and publication excellence that’s got us all excited and on our toes. We’re constantly seeking and testing new ways to work together to realize fully the promise of our technology and publications. We’re challenging ourselves and each other as we do so, and the result is a workplace afire with purpose, change, and, yes, lots of banter, scattered haikus of resistance, and really, really bad puns.

So, check the Jobs at IU site for future openings and consider applying! You won’t regret it. Don’t just take my word for it—hear about the energy and awesome work of the new Indiana University Press from the staff themselves.

Photo by Tall and Small Photography

"I have been working at IU Press for a full year and I couldn’t have imagined a better or more exciting time to start in my position. Within this past year we have created a strategic plan outlining our goals and steps for the next several years. This plan was not only approved by Indiana University but was also fully funded, giving us the resources to do some truly ground-breaking work in academic publishing and to revolutionize our acquisitions and production processes. One example of our new publishing strategy is the development of an accelerated publishing program in collaboration with our journals department which is allowing us to turn panels at conferences into peer-reviewed books by the next year’s meeting.

"As publishers our objective is to find and disseminate great stories and everyone who works here is committed to that goal. We have a wonderfully collaborative and supportive environment. Every day I meet informally and formally with colleagues from all departments at the Press to discuss projects at all stages from idea to just arriving in the warehouse. A phrase you hear frequently is 'what’s best for the book?' as we work together to find the best way to share research.

"This is also a great place to learn. When I started my background was in journal publishing, not books. Over this last year I have quickly learned many of the ins and outs of book publishing thanks to my colleagues. Everyone, from the director on down, is approachable and willing to answer my questions about a specific process. Despite being a junior member of the staff and new to book publishing I have always felt encouraged to share my ideas and thoughts on projects and procedures and I know that anything I say is listened to and fully taken into consideration. As I begin my second year with IU Press I look forward to continuing to learn and grow." —Janice Frisch, Assistant Acquisitions Editor

"Start-up fever is in the air—it’s here every morning when I come in. Academic presses may have a staid reputation, but we’re about to turn this place on its head. We’ve received the sincerest form of support a university can provide—new money to take this press to the next level—and we have a new director who is an idea machine. Mix in a staff of smart and talented professionals, and what’s going to happen? New products, in print and online; new publishing formats to increase the breadth of info we present; growing our list by embracing new authors and fields of study—all this, plus a top-to-bottom overhaul of all the stuff behind the curtain, the tools and machinery to bring these many ideas to life. I feel lucky—I’m in on the ground floor of something great." —Dave Miller, Lead Project Manager/Editor

"When you work in publishing in Bloomington, people always ask you if you work for Indiana University Press. Until about six months ago, my standard answer for the last 12 years has been, 'No, but I’ve always thought it would be a great place to work.' And, I can honestly say, that I’ve not been disappointed. The people here show real passion for their jobs, and there is always a quiet buzz in the air. Being a book lover, what could be better than working at world-renowned academic publishing house?

"Having had the opportunity to travel for the Press both domestically and internationally, I’ve spoken with lots of people who are very excited to see what the future of the Press will hold. News of our new strategic plan is starting to spread, and they can’t wait to see what happens. Given the renewed commitment of the university to the Press, you can definitely add me to that list. I honestly feel that I began working for the university at an ideal moment in time. We are on the cusp of change, and I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to help mold the future of the Press as we continue toward Indiana University’s bicentennial." —Stephen Williams, Rights and Permissions Manager

"I love books. I read everything. Novels, romances, biographies, self-help, spirituality studies, mysteries, fantasy, science fiction, young adult—anything that catches my interest (Vampires! Harry Potter!). I’ve often joked that I need a grocery cart when I visit the library. So it was a thrill when my career path in design led me to IU Press. As a designer, not much of my work has longevity. Digital design is mutable and fleeting, and most print design ends up as trash at some point. But books live for lifetimes and even longer.

"I feel very proud and fortunate to spend my days with colleagues who care so deeply about the important job we do publishing scholarly work from new authors as well as seasoned ones. Being a part of a university that cares deeply about supporting the mission of a scholarly publisher gives me great hope for the future. I am excited to see what lies ahead for IUP as we become even more technologically savvy, and expand our very important trade/regional list. But I think my personal favorite thing about working at IUP are the blurring of lines between departments, as we form collaborative cross-departmental teams to work on new initiatives, as well as the partnerships we are strengthening or forming with other departments on campus. It’s an exciting time to be a member of the IU Press team!" —Jennifer Witzke, Senior Artist and Book Designer

"Right now I’m really excited to be working on helping shape the APP (Accelerated Publishing Program). The program’s purpose is to quickly bring publications to market and re-present content in a different format to reach a broader audience. It’s exciting to be able to help shape this—it can be challenging too—going from concept to finished product in a short period of time can be difficult but I enjoy a good problem to solve. I’ve had to continually up my technical skills during this process, and have had the full support of the Press in doing so.

"I am enthusiastic about the Press’s views on continuing education and skill-building. Since the new Press has been around, I’ve been given the opportunity to learn XML and XSLT, with the aim toward developing our own XML transformations. Being afforded the time to learn these new skills on the job is refreshing and significantly contributes to my job satisfaction—I love learning new things and being given the chance to grow and help shape the future of the Press is fulfilling." —Dan Pyle, Online Publishing Manager

"When I first started at the Press as an intern, I quickly realized that IU Press was a special place. Every person I worked with was (and still is!) passionate about his or her job and believed in the mission of the Press. Over the last few years at the Press, we’ve come together even more closely, breaking down departmental lines and collaborating to make each book or journal the best it can be. In part, this happened naturally when IU renovated the third floor of the Wells Library and moved the Press into the heart of the campus. With the Press integrated on one floor, we began reaching out to our cube buddies across the hall to solve problems or best resolve an author’s questions. Our new director, Gary Dunham, and all the department heads also actively encouraged us to learn more about our colleagues, to communicate more closely, and to watch for ways we can work together more efficiently.

"By forming these close-knit, interdepartmental relationships, we’re poised for a very exciting 2017 and beyond. By bringing all of our skills and knowledge together, along with the support of the university, we’re ready to take on new opportunities and frontiers in publishing, such as producing cutting-edge books from special issues of our journals, creating crowdsourced books, developing communities of research and scholarship around our books and authors, and publishing and promoting the phenomenal research taking place on IU’s campus. With the upcoming Indiana and IU bicentennials, we’re embracing our Hoosier roots and pursuing projects that reveal the heart of the state and the people who live in it, while continuing our dedication to publishing the best scholarship from around the globe. It’s exciting to work with a passionate group of colleagues to connect some of the best emerging and established scholars with readers and fellow scholars who will appreciate and build upon their research." —Michelle Sybert, Marketing Manager/Journals

"The Press has been around for over 65 years, but in the last few years a lot of things have been changing. I seem to have joined the team right at a critical juncture. We’ve really been looking at what it takes to stay relevant as a university press as media consumption and university systems are changing.

"We’ve moved to a different building, become part of IU libraries, 'acquired' a new director, and have seen a lot of staff turnover and reorganization. To paraphrase a classic TV show, 'We can rebuild it. We have the technology. We can make it better than it was. Better, stronger, faster.'

"It’s the right time to embrace change and make IU Press into something more. I personally look forward to exploring new printing and publishing technologies as we look to make our products more widely accessible. I look forward to the new subject areas and disciplines we will be exploring and bringing to readers—both academic and general audiences. We have the right team in place to have IU Press take advantage of all its untapped potential." —Laura Hohman, Production Coordinator/Vendor Liaison

For a behind-the-scenes look at what it's like to work at IUP, follow the staff on Twitter!

Richard Doyle, "The Fairy Queen Takes an Airy Drive," illustration from In Fairyland

What do a butterfly-winged fairy and a bizarrely-shaped microbe have in common? For contemporary readers, the answer is clear: not much. Fairies are imaginary creatures of childish fantasy, while microbes belong to the world of scientific fact. But in the Victorian period, the two creatures were intimately linked in the popular imagination by virtue of their size and their invisibility to the naked eye.

It’s a connection that is almost too strange to be believed.

In the nineteenth century, historical developments in the idea of the fairy and the operation of the microscope meant that the Victorians were imagining two invisible worlds at the same time. As a result, many Victorians looked through the microscope and saw fairies, and imagined fairyland in terms of microscopic discoveries.

In the 21st century, most of us suppose that fairies have always been imagined as miniature creatures bearing the wings of a butterfly. But this image is actually a relatively new one. Traditional fairies were about the size of a small child and dwelt on the edges of civilization. The miniature fairy first appeared in literature in Mercutio’s Queen Mab speech in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Fairies gained butterfly wings only much later. In 1797, Thomas Stothard illustrated Alexander Pope’s sylphs in The Rape of the Lock with butterfly wings for the first time.

Detail from “Triumphal March of the Elf-King,” from In Fairyland, illustrated by Richard Doyle. Image courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum

Stothard’s image captured the public imagination. Illustrations and paintings of butterfly-winged fairies proliferated by the mid-century and gained further prominence as the century advanced. Illustrated children’s books appeared with charming names like The Midsummer Fairies: Or the Adventures of Tiny, Tinier and Tiniest (1883) and Fly-Away Fairies and Baby Blossoms (1882). Richard Doyle’s illustrations for the poem In Fairyland (1870) captured the playfulness of fairy illustrations of the period; his fairies frolic with red-hatted elves amidst flower blossoms and mushroom caps, or march in long processions (as shown in the image).

Not all fairy representations were so lighthearted in tone. For some Victorian painters and authors, the idea of an invisible world of fairy life carried fearful possibilities. John Anster “Fairy” Fitzgerald painted fairies in nature tormenting robins, bats and mice. In The Captive Robin, fairies sit at a table with elaborate headwear, while a robin sits nearby, restrained by a flower garland, and a bizarre demon-like winged creature sits next to the table.

Detail from John Anster Fitzgerald, The Captive Robin.

Joel Noel Patton painted fairies in vast hordes; Lewis Carroll famously counted 165 fairies in a single image of The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania. In literary tales for the fairy by Rudyard Kipling, Jean Ingelow, and H.G. Wells, among others, the cultural loss of belief in the fairy represented how the Victorians had lost touch with their past. Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the great masterpieces of Victorian fairy art, The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, was produced by Richard Dadd from an insane asylum.

To be clear, very few Victorian adults actually believed in fairies. In this, the Victorians differed from the Edwardians. In 1917, the Cottingley fairy photographs were published, showing two little girls posing with butterfly-winged fairies. A controversy erupted. Prominent Edwardians, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, defended the photographs (which are obviously fraudulent to the eyes of contemporary viewers) as mechanical proof of the existence of fairies. This represented a departure from the previous century. The Victorians embraced the fairy as a figure not of fact but of “what if?” possibility. What if fairies were real? What if the world were enchanted?

What if? At the same time that middle and upper-class Victorians were imagining miniature fairies, they were also seeing microbes for the first time. Historians of science often call 1830 the beginning of the era of modern microscopy. This meant that the scientific innovations made the microscope more reliable than ever before. It also meant that, by the 1850s and 60s, microscopes had become relatively inexpensive and popular to purchase.

"Monster Soup commonly called Thames Water" (1828), by William Heath

The microscope was still, in the Victorian period, a finicky instrument. Users might easily make technical errors that would result in false images. To guard against this, scientists composed hefty, five-hundred plus page tomes on how to use the microscope. At the same time, naturalists wrote breezy, brief guides to microscopic use. These works aimed, not to guard against error, but rather to stimulate the imagination of the user. Through the lens of the microscope, a drop of Thames water became, as shown in the illustration above, “Monster Soup.” The shock of this realization is underlined, in the illustration above, by the tea cup falling to the ground.

Naturalists’ guides to the microscope emphasized that there was no precedent for the experience of gazing through the microscope’s lens. A user might stare at a sample on a slide and see nothing. Put the same sample under the lens and – voila! – the user saw an world of life and activity. The microscope transformed nature into a real-world fairyland. “In the tiniest piece of mould on a decayed fruit, the tiniest animalcule from the stagnant pool,” Charles Kingsley told his listeners in an 1846 speech, “will imagination find inexhaustible wonders, and fancy a fairy-land.”

The microscope provided a fantasy of other worlds, invisible to the naked eye. To capitalize upon this idea, John Benjamin Dancer began in the 1850s to produce microphotographs. These slides showed famous images, like the Last Judgment by Michelangelo, on microscopic slides. To see the image, the user must place the slide under the microscope’s lens. Microphotographs briefly caught on as a popular fad and were sold in catalogues next to slides of samples taken from the nature world.

Microphotograph of Michelangelo’s The Last Judgment, created by John Benjamin Dancer. Images courtesy of A Cabinet of Curiosities, victorianmicroscopicslides.com.

The microscope and the fairy offered parallel opportunities for the Victorians to imagine invisible worlds of minute life. But the microscope and the fairy were also imagined together. In this article, you will read about fairies who were espied through the microscope’s lens and about science books that employed fairies as teachers. Far from being mere cultural oddities, I argue, these examples of fairy science reveal a form of scientific enchantment in the Victorian world.

January 20, 2016

This month, we continue the celebration of our state's literary heritage with a new post by Barbara Shoup in our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf blog series. This series is written by Hoosier authors about their favorite Indiana books and writers.

By Barbara Shoup

A cemetery is a good place for young writers to visit because it is about dying, and anything about dying is about living as well. It is useful to wander among the graves of those whose lives are over. To feel grateful that you are still here, living the story of your life and turning it into words. So over the twenty years I taught creative writing at the Broad Ripple High School Center for the Humanities and the Performing Arts in Indianapolis, we took an annual field trip to Crown Hill Cemetery. This was when you could still take kids in your car and kids with cars of their own could drive themselves, so we’d caravan across town, wind our way up to the James Whitcomb Riley grave, the highest point in Indianapolis. I’d spread a red-checked tablecloth on the big marble slab, start up the mix tape on my boom box: “The Not Necessarily Grateful Dead,” songs by performers no longer with us, and we’d eat our picnic lunches. From where we sat, the city we lived in looked like Oz.

To be honest, though, I did not choose JWR’s grave as the site for our excursion to celebrate his poetry. I chose it for irony’s sake. (Really? He’s the Indiana writer with the gargantuan monument?) I’m annoyed that all too often his name is the first one mentioned when the subject of Indiana writers comes up. Okay. He’s part of our history. I get that.

So are a lot of (wonderful) dead Indiana writers.

But in my writing classroom, we studied Indiana writers who were alive. So many talented young people flee the state as soon as they can. I wanted my students to know that literature made of the stuff of their own Indiana lives could be as rich and mysterious as lives led in more exotic places.

Now, as the executive director of the Indiana Writers Center, I try to spread that message around the state—and beyond. We all need to do a better job of celebrating Indiana writers, promoting their work so that theirs are the names that come up when conversation turns to Indiana literature.

Thanks to an Indiana Masterpiece Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission, the Writers Center has the opportunity to do just that with an anthology of contemporary Indiana writers to be published early next fall. Many accomplished Indiana writers have already agreed to be part of the project, including, Scott Russell Sanders, Susan Neville, Patricia Henley, Helen Frost, Karen Kovacik, and Michael Martone.

The book will be a “snapshot” of Indiana writers at the time of its 2016 Bicentennial. It will be launched with a series of readings, classroom visits, and writing workshops around the state.

But here’s the best part: the anthology will be appropriate for use in the high school classroom. It will be available online to English and writing teachers, along with curriculum materials designed to meet state standards.

While you’re waiting to read it, check out some of the writers mentioned above, if you aren’t already familiar with them. And here are some more I’m thrilled will be included: Shari Wagner, George Kalamaras, Greg Schwipps, Sarah Layden, Bryan Furuness, and Jim McGarrah.

Barbara Shoup is author of seven novels and co-author of two books about the creative process. Her short fiction, poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in The Writer and in the New York Timestravel section, and her young adult novels, Wish You Were Here and Stranded in Harmony, were selected as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Shoup is executive director of the Indiana Writers Center and in 2012 was the regional winner of the Indiana Authors Award. Her novel An American Tunewill be released in paperback this August by IU Press.

Our Indiana Bicentennial Bookshelf series will continue every month as we count down to 200th anniversary of the state on December 11, 2016. In February Larry Lockridge will co-blog for us and the Next Indiana Bookshelf about his father Ross Lockridge, Jr.'s novel Raintree County, which is a Bookshelf selection. Larry Lockridge is author of his father's biography Shade of the Raintree, reissued last year by IU Press.

January 15, 2016

To ease everyone back into the semester, Christopher Oldstone-Moore and the editors at Victorian Studies are bringing you some Friday fun. You can now read Oldstone-Moore's article "The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain" from Victorian Studies 48.1 for free. Since it's been a few years since the article was first published, Oldstone-Moore has provided us with on update on his latest beard scholarship. Check out "The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain" and then take a look at the latest issue of Victorian Studies for more fantastic scholarship!

By Christopher Oldstone-Moore, Wright State University

The article, “The Beard Movement in Victorian Britain,” was the first step in my plan to tell the story of beards in Western Civilization. I had a hunch that changing attitudes to facial hair over time reflected shifts in ideals of masculinity. My study of Victorian Britain demonstrated two things: that there was a surprising abundance of sources for such a history, and that my original hypothesis was correct. I could conclude that men were trying to redefine masculinity in the 1850s and 60s because men of that era were self-conscious enough to say so. It was, in other words, a true movement; that is, a deliberate effort to use facial hair to represent a more forthright and physical manliness.

Since the publication of the Victorian Studies article, I focused on the rest of Western history, finally completing Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair. Here I chart four “beard movements” (2nd, 11th, 16th, 19th centuries) and try also to explain the prevalence of shaving for most of Western history. Shaving has been linked to the fundamental ideal of regulated masculinity properly linked to a social collective, while growing beards has been associated with periodic reorientation towards the a “natural” masculinity founded on the supposed moral and physical strengths of the male body.

All this is made more relevant by speculations about the dawn of a new bearded era in our own day. Facial hair is more in evidence, and has gained wider acceptance, than at any time in the past 120 years. A move towards hair in the sixties and seventies proved incomplete and temporary, and the questions now are whether our time is any different, and whether current anxieties about what it means to be a man in our gender-fluid era will provoke men to turn once again to hair to help them make a more impressive physical display.

January 13, 2016

We're starting the new year right by giving away more advance reading copies of our upcoming spring 2016 books on Goodreads than ever before! In fact, there are so many galleys, that I had to store the overflow under my desk:

If you'd like a chance to win one of the 100 advance reading copies I have in my office, then click on the links below to enter our Goodreads giveaways. We're offering five copies each of the following titles:

All entries must be received by February 12, 2016. You need to have a Goodreads account in order to enter the book giveaways. Not a member? Sign up here—it's free and a great way to connect with other book lovers!

Learn more about all our upcoming spring 2016 books in our latest catalog.

January 12, 2016

This is the first post in a series from IU Press Journals that will take a closer look at the scholarship in the articles and issues of IU Press journals. Posts may respond to articles, provide background, document the development process, or explain why scholars are excited about the journal, theme, or article and will primarily be written by journal editors and contributors.

It was an honor to have been asked to contribute to this special issue of the PMER commemorating Bennett Reimer’s life and contributions to music education nationally and internationally. As I wrote in my own essay, I had been introduced to Bennett’s philosophy in the mid-1970s by David Elliott, who was then a young lecturer at the University of Toronto and working on his doctorate with Bennett. Both men had a profound impact on the direction of my career. Elliott was a wonderful teacher who challenged his students to think critically about the profession and its problems, and Bennett’s first edition of his book provided much of the intellectual grounding for the course. There I learned that music education was essentially about ideas that could be contested. Who knew? David’s courses were the only ones in my undergraduate career in which I was permitted, indeed encouraged, to research and to write papers on ideas or topics of my own choosing, and I discovered that I could write. After teaching for several years in my home province of Newfoundland and Labrador, I enrolled in a masters program at the University of Western Ontario from 1981 to 1983, where Bennett’s book was again a requisite.

After completing my masters studies at the University of Western Ontario, I later stumbled into Northwestern University’s Ph. D. in Music Education—that’s a story for another time—without realizing that Reimer was the mainstay of the program. While in residence in Evanston during 1990–1992, I served as his teaching assistant and was for a third time exposed to his philosophy, albeit this time using the 1989 edition of A Philosophy of Music Education. This allowed me a greater appreciation of the changes in his thinking since the 1970 edition, but, once again, there was little or no talk about the politics of music education, except with reference to the importance of finalizing the national music education standards to which Bennett had been a contributor, and later, a defender. It was only a year or two after completing my dissertation based on Dewey’s How We Think (with Bennett as my primary advisor), that I began to realize that I (and much of the music teaching profession) had overlooked, glossed over, or deliberately ignored Dewey’s politics, of which How We Think (1910), Art As Experience (1934), and The Public and Its Problems (1927/1946), to name only a few of his books, were expressions. Ontario had just elected a rabidly neoconservative government whose neoliberal economic and educational policies were traumatizing teachers at all levels (Ontario had the biggest teachers strike in the history of North America in 1997), and in my continued reading I learned not only that Dewey had been confronted by many of the same problems in his own day, but that he had been a champion of the arts in education. For him, all education, and including art education, had political purpose!

I grew increasingly disturbed that none of this had been made known to me when a student at any point in my university experience, and the events of 9/11 galvanized me to do something about the great schisms in our world between the political left and right, and ‘west and the rest’ (see Ferguson’s 2011 book Civilization: The West and the Rest) which were as much cultural as economic. Music education could and should contribute to social amelioration, which of course was Dewey’s project. Hence my motivation for the present critique of his philosophy, that it relegated music teachers to the margins of American and Canadian education by reducing music education to decoration or distraction when the truth of the matter is that music has always been implicated in many of our most troubling and implacable problems—and occasionally their resolution.

To conclude this story, Reimer later made some links between music education and democracy in the third edition of A Philosophy of Music Education (2002). His definition of democracy, however, was vague, and probably deliberately so to avoid controversy. Despite his long avoidance of politics, however, I have nevertheless always held him in high regard because he provided much needed professional leadership at a time when it was sorely needed, because he was willing to listen and change in response to professional criticism, and because he was a kind and compassionate man and teacher who, like us all, was fallible and shaped in ways that he probably didn’t fully realize because so much of education reform since the 1950s has had the imprimatur of science and economics and therefore been regarded by government and business as unassailable, as matters of fact rather than ideas.